Without wishing to take sides as to the wrongs or rights of Mr Kilfoyle's charge, it is a sorry reflection on standards of ecclesiology in the fourth estate that his phrase caused perplexed shrugs in the Commons press gallery.

'Wot's a whitened sepluchre?' said a man from one of the upmarket liberal newspapers, not quite mastering the expression.

'Dunno,' replied a lad from a Labour red-top, scenting the air as he chewed the plastic top of his ballpoint pen. He was not sure he could get 'whited sepulchres' past his news editor.

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Mr Kilfoyle, who recently announced his retirement, is unaccustomed to the role of the grandee talking down to hoi polloi. Big Peter has spent most of his political career taking wheezy umbrage on behalf of the common man.

In his heyday there were few people better than Brother Kilfoyle at sucking every last ounce of marrow from a grievance.

But yesterday Mr Kilfoyle was on the side of the principle-polishing
lawyers. He was speaking in the Chamber after a Statement by Jack Straw
about the treatment of child killer Jon Venables.

Hon
Members lined up to argue that public curiosity about Venables - who
has been given a new identity and is now back in custody for we know
not what - should be resisted.

Mr
Straw did his 'I'm an open sort of guy' routine. He hoped the House
would accept that he liked to give as much information about
ministerial decisions as he possibly could. This from the man who was
Foreign Secretary when we went to war against Iraq.

Discussion of the Venables case had to be kept 'fair for the
defence and fair for the prosecution' in any judicial proceeding, said
Mr Straw, who is seldom happier than when presiding over high-minded
self-congratulation. Newspapers were accused of 'frenzied speculation'.

Mr Straw's Tory opponent, Dominic Grieve, declined to do what
other Oppositions might do - in fact, have done, if you think back to
the way Tony Blair capitalised on the Bulger killing in the 1990s.

Mr Grieve, who could never be mistaken for a rabble rouser,
spoke like the lawyer he is. He asserted that 'the role of ministers is
not to ebb and flow with media speculation'.

The Lib Dems' frontbencher, David Howarth, fully agreed with Messrs Straw and Grieve. 'There is a right to know but there is no right to know everything immediately,' he said. Several MPs agreed broadly with this position. David Davis (Con, Howden & Haltemprice) urged the House to beware 'lynch mob law'.

In the age of the focus group, is it not interesting - I have no desire to put it more strongly than that - that the House of Commons still takes such an approach and contains no vivid, mercurial orator to challenge yesterday's consensus?

Some will see this as an affirmation of the parliamentary system. Others will say that it is an example of the Commons being 'out of touch' with public feelings.

The House's other chief attraction yesterday, if 'attraction' is quite the word, was Ed Balls, Education Secretary. Shouty, indignant, partisan, coarse, he was everything that Messrs Straw and Grieve and Howarth were not - but not in a good way.

Mr Balls is the embodiment of overstatement, of vacuous hyperbole, of misdirected, self-seeking, vote-destroying, bulgy-eyed fury.

At one point he had to be asked by the Speaker to withdraw a silly allegation that his shadow, Michael Gove, was lying. Mr Balls did so in such a sullen way that the Tory benches immediately barked: 'Hah!'

Mr Balls: 'It sounds like they've had a large lunch and that was a large belch.'